Nvidia GTC: Blackwell Platform for Gen AI Steals Show

NVIDIA GTC — Nvidia continues to lead the AI races. 

At its annual conference Monday in San Jose, California, the maker of semiconductors and GPUs unleashed an avalanche of news. Perhaps the biggest nugget to come out of Nvidia GTC that stands to interest channel partners is the release of the Blackwell platform. Nvidia bills Blackwell as technology that lets organizations do real-time generative AI on trillion-parameter large language models at up to 25-times less cost and energy consumption than its predecessor.

The platform comprises Nvidia’s GB200 Grace Blackwell Superchip and the B100 Tensor Core GPUs. It’s named after David Harold Blackwell — a mathematician who specialized in game theory and statistics, and who was the first Black scholar inducted into the National Academy of Sciences. The new Blackwell architecture succeeds Hopper, launched two years ago.

In the slideshow above, look for insights into Nvidia’s expanded partnerships with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Oracle, all of which will put Blackwell to use. In the meantime, here are some technical details around Blackwell:

“For three decades we’ve pursued accelerated computing, with the goal of enabling transformative breakthroughs like deep learning and AI,” Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, said. “Generative AI is the defining technology of our time. Blackwell is the engine to power this new industrial revolution. Working with the most dynamic companies in the world, we will realize the promise of AI for every industry.”

Nvidia GTC also featured a number of other announcements, the most applicable to channel partners we're covering for you at a high level. Get all the nitty-gritty details at Nvidia’s online newsroom.

Meanwhile, above we feature some of the pithiest takeaways from Huang’s Nvidia GTC 2024 keynote speech, as well as more insight into how AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and other vendors are working more with Nvidia.